Donkey Kong 64

Donkey Kong 64 is the game that broke the collect-a-thon. Not intentionally — Rare clearly poured everything they had into making the biggest, most feature-packed 3D platformer the N64 had ever seen. And they succeeded. DK64 is enormous. The problem is that bigger isn't always better, and somewhere in the quest to fill every corner of every world with something to collect, the game lost sight of what made Banjo-Kazooie so special: restraint.

Five Kongs, Five Times the Content

The headline feature is five playable Kongs — Donkey Kong, Diddy, Lanky, Tiny, and Chunky — each with unique abilities, weapons, instruments, and color-coded collectibles. DK can pull levers and use his coconut gun. Diddy flies with a jetpack. Lanky stretches his arms to reach distant platforms. Tiny can shrink through tiny passages. Chunky can lift heavy objects and grow to enormous size.

On paper, this sounds incredible. In practice, it means that each of the game's eight worlds must be traversed multiple times with different Kongs. A golden banana that's visible as DK can only be collected as Tiny, forcing you to exit the world, switch characters, and return. Multiply this across five characters and hundreds of collectibles, and the backtracking becomes significant.

The Worlds

The worlds themselves are impressive. Jungle Japes, Angry Aztec, Frantic Factory, Gloomy Galleon, Fungi Forest, Crystal Caves, Creepy Castle, and the final Hideout Helm span a wide range of environments and are packed with detail. Fungi Forest, which features a day-night cycle that changes the available challenges, is a standout. Frantic Factory's industrial maze is creative if occasionally confusing.

Each world contains twenty-five golden bananas (five per Kong), hundreds of regular bananas, banana medals, blueprint pieces, banana coins, and Kasplat enemies. The sheer volume of collectibles is staggering, and the game requires a minimum number of golden bananas to progress, ensuring you can't simply sprint through.

Presentation

Technically, DK64 is impressive. It was one of the few N64 games to require the Expansion Pak, and the extra memory shows in the draw distance, world size, and visual detail. Grant Kirkhope's soundtrack is characteristically excellent, with each world receiving a memorable theme and the iconic DK Rap opening the game in spectacularly cheesy fashion.

The boss battles are creative and varied, often involving unique mechanics tied to specific Kong abilities. The final battle against King K. Rool is a multi-phase boxing match that's genuinely entertaining.

Verdict

Donkey Kong 64 is a game of tremendous ambition and questionable editing. There's a great platformer buried inside it — the individual challenges are often clever, the world design is impressive, and the Kong abilities are fun to use. But the relentless padding, mandatory character switching, and sheer volume of collectibles dilute the experience. It's a game that would have been better with half the content and twice the focus. Still worth playing for platformer fans willing to embrace the excess, but it's telling that Rare never made another game quite like it.